William
Wycherley, the typical Restoration
dramatist, and one of the greatest masters of the comedy of repartee,
was born about 1640 at Clive, near Shrewsbury, where for several
generations his family had been settled on an estate yielding
about £600 a year. His youth was chiefly spent in France,
whither, at the age of fifteen, he was sent to be educated amid
the charmed circle of the précieuses. His friend, Major
Pack, tells us that his hero "improved, with the greatest
refinements, the extraordinary talents for which he was obliged
to nature." Although the harmless affectations of the Rambouillets
and Montausiers, among whom he was thrown, are certainly not
chargeable with the "refinements" of Wycherley's comedies--they
seem to have been much more potent in regard to the refinements
of his religion.

Though a man of strong intellectual power, Wycherley was a
fine gentleman first, a responsible being afterward. Hence, it
required no great persuasion to turn him from the Protestantism
of his fathers to Romanism, as afterward, at Oxford, with the
same easy alacrity, he turned back to Protestantism, under the
manipulations of such an accomplished master in the art of conversion
as Bishop Barlow. And if, as Macaulay hints, Wycherley's turning
back to Romanism once more had something to do with the patronage
and liberality of James II, this merely proves that the deity
he worshipped was the deity of the polite world of his time--gentility.
Moreover, as a professional fine gentleman, at a period when,
as the genial Major Pack says, "the amours of Britain would
furnish as diverting memoirs, if well related, as those of Nero's
court writ by Petronius," Wycherley was obliged to be a
loose liver. But, for all that, Wycherley's sobriquet, of "Manly
Wycherley," seems to have been fairly earned by that frank
and straightforward way of confronting life which, according
to Pope and Swift, characterized also his brilliant successor,
Vanbrugh.

The effort of Wycherley's to bring to Buckingham's notice
the case of Samuel Butler, so shamefully neglected by the court
which he had served, shows that even the writer of such heartless
plays as The Country Wife was familiar with generous impulses,
while his uncompromising lines in defense of Buckingham, when
the duke in his turn fell into trouble, show that the inventor
of so shameless a fraud as that which forms the pivot of The
Plain Dealer may in actual life possess the passion for fair-play
which is believed to be a specially English quality. But among
the ninety-nine religions with which Voltaire accredited England
there is one whose permanency has never been shaken--the worship
of gentility. To this Wycherley remained faithful to the day
of his death; and if his relations to "that other world
beyond," which the Puritans had adopted, were liable to
change with his environment, it was because that other world
was altogether out of fashion.

Wycherley's university career seems also to have been influenced
by the same causes. Although Puritanism had certainly not contaminated
the universities, yet English "quality and politeness"--to
use Major Pack's words--had always, since the Revolution, been
rather ashamed of possessing too much learning. As a fellow-commoner
of Queen's college, Oxford, therefore he was entered only as
a "student of philosophy," which meant a student of
nothing in particular; and he does not seem to have matriculated
or to have taken a degree. Nor when, on quitting Oxford, he entered
himself at the Middle Temple, did he give any more attention
to the dry study of the law than was proper to one so warmly
caressed "by the persons most eminent for their quality
and politeness."

Wycherley's highest delights were in pleasure and the stage,
and in 1672 he produced at Drury Lane theatre his Love in
a Wood. With regard to this comedy he told Pope, and repeated
his statement until Pope believed him--at least until they quarrelled--that
he wrote it the year before he went to Oxford. But we need not
believe him; for the worst witness against a man is often himself.
To pose as the wicked boy of genius has been the foolish ambition
of many writers, but on inquiry it will generally be found that
these ink-born Lotharios are not nearly so wicked as they would
have us suppose. When Wycherley charges himself with having written,
as a boy of nineteen, scenes so callous and so depraved that
even Barbara Palmer's appetite for profligacy was satisfied,
there is no need to believe him. Indeed, there is every reason
to discredit him; for the whole air and spirit of the piece belong
to an experienced and hardened man of the world, and not to a
boy who would fain pose as such. Not only in depravity of moral
tone, but in real dramatic ripeness, some of the scenes are the
strongest to be found among Wycherley's plays. If, indeed, a
competent critic were asked to point out the finest touch in
all his writings, he would probably select a speech in the third
scene of the third act of this very comedy, where the vain, foolish
and boastful rake Dapperwit, having taken his friend to see his
mistress for the express purpose of advertising his lordship
over her, is coolly denied and insolently repulsed. "I think,"
says Dapperwit, "women take inconstancy from me worse than
from any man breathing." The remark is worthy of the hand
that drew Malvolio; and certain it is that no mere boy could
have described, by this quiet touch, a vanity as impenetrable
as the chain-armor which no shaft can pierce.

That the writer of such a play should at once become the talk
of King Charles' court was inevitable; equally inevitable was
it that the author of the song at the end of the first act, in
praise of harlots and their offspring, should touch to its depth
the soul of the duchess of Cleveland. Possibly Wycherley intended
this famous song as a glorification of her Grace and her profession,
for he seems to have been more delighted than surprised when,
as he passed in his coach through Pall Mall, he heard the duchess
address him from her carriage window as a "rascal,"
a "villain" and as a son of the very kind of lady his
song had lauded. His answer was in perfect readiness: "Madame,
you have been pleased to bestow a title on me which belongs only
to the fortunate." Perceiving that she received the compliment
in the spirit in which it was meant, he lost no time in calling
upon her, and was from that moment the recipient of those favors
to which he alludes with pride in the dedication of the play
to her. Voltaire's story that the titled dame used to go to Wycherley's
chambers in the Temple disguised as a country wench, in a straw
hat, shod with pattens and a basket in her hand, may be in part
apocryphal, for certain it is that disguise was quite superfluous
in the case of the mistress of Charles II. At least it shows
how general was the opinion that, under such patronage, Wycherley's
fortune as a poet and dramatist, "eminent for his quality
and politeness," was now assured.

In The Relapse, the third of Wycherley's plays, the
mistake of introducing the element of farce damages a splendid
comedy, but leaves it a capital play still. In The Gentleman
Dancing Master this mingling of discordant elements destroys
a piece that would never, under any circumstances, have been
strong, but which abounds in animal spirits and is luminous here
and there with true dramatic points. It is, however, on his two
last comedies, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer,
that Wycherley's fame must rest as a master of that comedy of
repartee which, inaugerated by Etherege, and afterward brought
to perfection by Congreve and Vanbrugh,
supplanted the humoristic comedy of the Elizabethans.

The Country Wife is so full of wit, ingenuity, animal
spirits and lively humor that, had it not been for its motive--as
repulsive to the most lax as to the most moral of readers--it
would probably have survived as long as the acted drama retained
a literary form in England. So strong, indeed, is the hand that
could draw such a character as Marjory Pinchwife, as Sparkish
and Horner, the latter the undoubted original of all those cool,
impudent rakes with whom the English stage has since been familiar,
that Wycherley is certainly entitled to a place alongside Congreve
and Vanbrugh. It seems difficult to deny that Wycherley is the
most vigorous of the three. In order to do justice to the merits
of The Country Wife we have only to compare it with The
Country Girl, afterward made famous by the acting of Mrs.
Jordan, the play in which Garrick
endeavored to free Wycherley's comedy of its load of licentiousness
by altering and sweetening the motive, as Voltaire afterward
endeavored to purify the motive of The Plain Dealer in
La Prude. While the two versions of Garrick and Voltaire
are as dull as the Æsop of Boursault, the texture
of Wycherley's dialogue would seem to scintillate with the changing
hues of a shaken prism, were it not that the many-colored lights
rather suggest the miasmatic radiance of a foul ditch shimmering
in the sun.

And hardly inferior to The Country Wife is The Plain
Dealer, of which Voltaire said: "I know of no comedy,
ancient or modern, that ha so much spirit." It is, indeed,
impossible to overestimate the immense influence of this comedy,
as regards manipulation of dialogue, upon all subsequent comedies
of repartee, from those of Congreve and Vanbrugh to those of
Douglas Jerrold and T.W. Robertson; and, as to characters, he
who would trace the ancestry of Tony Lumpkin and Mrs. Hardcastle
has only to turn to Jerry Blackacre and his mother, while Manly,
for whom Wycherley's early patron, the duke of Montausier, sat,
though he is perhaps overdone, has dominated this kind of stage
character ever since. Few, perhaps, are aware how constantly
the blunt sententious utterances of the last of these personages
have reappeared, not on the stage alone, but in the novel and
even in poetry. If the comedy itself is extinct, this is because
a play whose motive is monstrous and intolerable can only live
in a monstrous and intolerable state of society; it is because
Wycherley's genius was followed by Nemesis, who always dogs the
footsteps of the defiler of literary art. But while we can excuse
Macaulay's indignation at what he terms this "satyr-like
defilement of art," the literary richness of the play almost
nullifies the value of the criticism.

Probably none of the plays of this period have been so frequently
quoted and adapted. Take, for instance, Manly's fine saying to
Freeman in the first act: "I weigh the man, not his title,
'tis not the king's stamp can make the metal better or heavier."
This we have in one of Burns' most famous couplets:

The rank is but the guinea stamp

The man's the gowd for a' that.

And so when, in Tristram Shandy, Sterne says: "Honors,
like impressions upon a coin, may give an ideal and local value
to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver will pass the world
over without any other recommendation than their even weight."
But it is in the fourth and fifth acts that the coruscations
of Wycherley's comic genius are the most dazzling; it is there,
also, that the licentiousness is most astounding. Not that the
worst scenes in this play are really more wicked than those from
other dramatists, but they are more seriously imagined, and being
less humorous, they are more terribly and earnestly realistic.
They form, indeed, a striking instance of the folly of the artist
who selects a story which cannot be dramatized without hurting
the finer instincts of human nature.

Wycherley's Marriage

It was after the success of The Plain Dealer that the
turning point came in Wycherley's career. The great dream of
all the men about town, as is shown in Wycherley's plays, was
to marry a widow, young and handsome, a peer's daughter if possible,
but in any event rich, and spend her money upon wine and women.
While talking to a friend in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge,
Wycherley heard The Plain Dealer asked for by a lady who,
in the person of the countess of Drogheda, answered all the above
requirements. An introduction ensued, then love-making, then
marriage--a secret marriage, for, fearing to lose the king's
patronage and the income therefrom, Wycherley still thought it
politic to pass as a bachelor. Whether because his countenance
wore a pensive and subdued expression, suggestive of a poet who
had married a dowager countess and awakened to the situation,
or whether treacherous confidants divulged his secret, does not
appear; but the news of his marriage soon oozed out, it reached
the royal ears, and deeply wounded the "merry monarch,"
who had intended to intrust to him the education of his son.
Wycherley lost the appointment that was so nearly within his
grasp; lost, indeed, the royal favor forever. He never had an
opportunity of regaining it, for the countess seems to have really
loved him, and Love in a Wood had proclaimed the
writer to be the kind of husband whose virtue prospers best when
closely guarded at the domestic hearth. Wherever he went the
countess followed him, and when she did allow him to meet his
boon companions it was in a tavern in Bow street, opposite his
own house, and even there under certain protective conditions.
In summer or in winter he was obliged to sit with the window
open and the blinds up, so that his wife might see that the party
included no member of a sex for which her husband's plays had
advertised his partiality. She died at last, however, and left
him the whole of her fortune.

But the title to the property was disputed; the costs of litigation
were heavy--so heavy that the poet's father was unable or unwilling
to come to his aid; and the result of his marrying the rich,
beautiful and titled widow was that Wycherley was thrown into
Fleet prison. He languished there for seven years, being finally
released by the liberality of James II, which, incredible as
it seems, is too well authenticated to be challenged. James had
been so much gratified by seeing The Plain Dealer acted
that, finding a parallel between Manly's "manliness"
and his own, such as no spectator before had discovered, he paid
off Wycherley's execution creditor. Other debts still troubled
him, however, and he never was released from his embarrassments,
not even after succeeding to a life estate in the family property.

As we come to Wycherley's death we come to the worst allegation
that has been made against him. At the age of seventy-five he
married a young girl, and is said to have done so in order to
spite his nephew, the next in succession, knowing that he himself
must shortly die and that the jointure would impoverish the estate.
No doubt it is true enough that he married the girl and died
a few days afterward; but, if we consider that the lady was young
and an heiress, or supposed to be an heiress, and if we further
consider how difficult it was for an old gallant of Wycherley's
personal vanity to realize his physical condition, we may well
suppose that, even if he talked about "marrying to spite
his nephew," he did so as a cloak for other impulses, such
as senile desire or senile cupidity, or a blending of both.

This article was originally published
in The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization,
vol XIV ed. Alfred Bates. New York: Historical Publishing
Company, 1906. pp. 108-119.